Ask X - New UI for Ask.com Secretly Launched — Tonight I stumbled upon what appears to be a brand new User Interface for Ask.com. I was doing some searches on Ask.com for a local kiwi band, when I noticed a link in the top right asking me to try out something called Ask X. Screenshot below:

Time for a new hit — When banner ads started cropping up on the Internet in the mid-'90s, the term "hit" was all the rage. A "hit" (as in, a hit to a server) was the reigning measurement of a site's popularity. Hits attempted to show how many times a page was viewed by a user.

Offline Involuntarily — Five years ago, the main challenge for data-hungry business travelers was finding a hotel that offered high-speed Internet access. Then came a shift to wireless and even free connections. — But these days, the top priority for many is simply getting consistent …

Coming in January: "Month of Apple Bugs" — A pair of security researchers has picked January 2007 as the starting point for a month-long project in which each passing day will feature a previously undocumented security hole in Apple's OS X operating system or in Apple applications that run on top of it.

Edit Pictures Online in Adobe Photoshop Style with Fauxto — Fauxto is a new player in the heavily crowded market of online photo editors but with a difference. — While the current breed of online image editing program provide tools to enhance or manipulate existing pictures inside the web browser …

FCC's McDowell Stands By Recusal on Merger Vote — UPDATED: Federal Communications Commission (FCC) member Robert McDowell is standing by his recusal from the agency's AT&T-BellSouth merger vote, declining an invitation to break the 2-2 deadlock over the $80 billion deal hung up on network neutrality conditions.

Nasa and Google reach for the stars — Google is extending its reach to the stars in an agreement with Nasa that will allow it to present web visualisations of the US space agency's data on the universe. — Nasa's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley on Monday announced a "Space Act Agreement" …

Zune Compatible with Vista: Today — Today (Tuesday the 19th of December) we're issuing a 22 MB update to make Zune compatible with Windows Vista. The update also improves the Zune software installation process, addressing the issues that some of the known issues users reported.

SlingPlayer Mobile Now Works With the Dash and BlackJack — With the latest update to the SlingMobile software, users of the HTC (T-Mobile) Dash and the Samsung (Cingular) BlackJack can now sling their media to and fro while on-the-go. The Dash has been out for around two months …

Suprnova.org: Two Years Since the Shutdown — Exactly two years ago today the legendary BitTorrent site Suprnova.org was taken offline. December 19, 2004, is a milestone in the history of BitTorrent. But how did it all start? Who was behind this legendary site? And what happened after is was taken down?

Silicon Valley (Ahem's) Society — So Marc Canter blogged down memory lane yesterday. His story goes like this: Back in the day, Stewart Alsop, Dave Winer and Canter used to hang out to kibbitz about the industry. They decided to form a secret organization called "The Silicon Valley (Ahem's) Society."